How should Churches use social media?

Over several years and having worked with a number of churches and ministries, it quickly became evident that what churches and ministries needed more than anything was support with social media.

Churches and ministries have realised that social media is where everybody is at, and that it is another great avenue to unite people to God.

As a church do you have guidelines for social media?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how your church should use social media, it is important for your church to firstly create a set of guidelines or a social media policy to follow when creating social media posts. These guidelines will then provide a set of practices, processes and set behaviour to follow for you as the church leader or social media manager and will also give you a real focus on where to go with your social media and how to go about it.

Once you have your guidelines set, then you can think about how to get started with these posts.

Use social media as a social medium rather than a promotional one

Do you as a church use social media to promote your upcoming events and services?

If so, then perhaps, you need to start thinking of social media more of a SOCIAL medium, rather than a promotional one.

As a church, your main focus is to connect with people. And what is the best way to do this as a church?

Well, it is by being the ministry that you are and to use social media itself as a ministry rather than a promotional tool.

So how about using social media as a tool to pray for people, or to show parts of your sermon, or to give them a taster of church life…

This leads churches to try to emulate how Jesus shared his ministry.

So many Christians will know that when Jesus taught the crowds that came to see him, he didn’t just give them a set of instructions, and then said go and do it, he used stories and parables so that the people would have a greater understanding of what he was teaching.

The Oxford Dictionary describes a parable as ‘a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels.’

The stories would also represent the culture and behaviour of those in that time.

So, it’s important to find out and be in tune with what is happening in the present-day and try to link that with Faith and the Word of God.

Think about common problems that people are facing today. Relationship problems, financial problems, alcohol, and drug abuse, and try to find a way of linking them to the Bible.

As well as keeping your content relevant to your audience, it is also crucial to keep your focus on your church mission.

Quality is Essential

The quality of your posts needs to be high. Put thought, care, love, and effort into your posts and really pay attention to what you’re posting. It’s not worth it if you’re just going to look for any old image and a few words to match it and hope that people respond to this, because they won’t.

It’s vital to connect with people in a personal way.

Following on from your posts, you may very well get people who may want to connect with you behind the scenes and send you private messages or may want to chat with you.

So again, this is why it is so important to have someone who oversees your social media who is also available to engage with your followers. Even if it means they then have to forward a message to a pastor e.g. for prayer.

There is no point creating a post, putting it out there, and when you get a response from a follower, are unable to acknowledge that person.

I believe that as a church, this is probably one of the most significant things that you will do when it comes to social media.

How do we Capture Attention

The best way to capture any person’s attention is by firstly, using images of other people, because we as humans connect better with other humans.

Now I believe that it would be valuable for you as a church to get real life photos of your church community really showing the way that you do church.

This is vital for people in order to help them connect, and to know that your church is indeed the type of church that they would want to attend.

So, yes, this does mean that you should try to get a designated person to take photos at your church. But this doesn’t need to be a professional photographer that you need to pay lots of money for.

I’m sure you should be able to find a few volunteers in your church who are passionate about photography, or at the very least, enjoy taking photos and who do it well.  Of course, if you do have the budget to pay them, by all means do. Give them a smart phone to capture images on Sundays and when you hold events. I’m sure you can find at least two or three people in your congregation who would be happy to, and be regularly be available to do this. But I would recommend giving this role to more than one person so that they can take it in turns and the responsibility is then not left to only one person.

Consistency is Key

It is incredibly important to stay consistent with your social media.

Churches must not underestimate the significance of regular and consistent posting on social media. You will often hear us say this, but it is crucial to get a designated person whose job it is to manage the social media for your church. You will need someone who is dedicated to this role and someone who actually enjoys doing it.

Again, it goes back to being able to connect with people and building relationships with them. You cannot build a relationship with someone when one day you’re in contact with them, and then they don’t hear from you again for months.

So as a church, find a regular and consistent pace that you can keep up with and then find the right person to do it.

How do these algorithms work on social media?

Algorithms are complicated, so I have simplified it here.

You need to have the types of posts which drive massive engagement, and which have fun incorporated in them. This signals to the algorithms that people like your content which therefore means that the algorithm will show your posts to more people.

How do you know whether a post is doing well?

Social media is not easy, and this is because it can be quite difficult to know which posts will do well.

So, the best thing to do is that when you do realise that a post has been popular, then continue to post images and content in that similar way.

One way of knowing how well a post is doing, is to count up all your engagement i.e. likes, comments etc. and divide this by the reach (the number of people who saw the post). Do this for 3 months and this should give you a good idea of how well your posts are doing.

For Instagram, go to Insights. You can search by date and rank it by metric.

What Next?

With all the above information in hand, the next step is to create a social media strategy. Not to worry, we will be writing up a blog on how to do this, so, do look out for this very soon.